“I’m headed to where stars are born,” Jon Stewart said Thursday night, on his last program before leaving the Daily Show for a three month hiatus. “The Middle East in the dead of summer.”
Stewart will be directing a movie based on the experiences of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, whom the Daily Show profiled in a 2009 field piece, a segment that may have gotten him in trouble with the Iranian government. Bahari was arrested one week after the piece aired.
“One of the things he was interrogated about was being in contact with an American spy,” Stewart said. The spy was Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones, who, as Stewart pointed out, is neither a spy nor American (he’s Canadian).
Bahari was eventually released following an international campaign, and wrote a book about his experiences, called And Then They Came For Me. Stewart and Bahari collaborated on a script for a movie treatment, which Stewart will film this summer, because, in his words, “Great literature is not great literature until it’s been made into a movie.”
John Oliver will take over hosting duties while Stewart is away and was seen measuring the drapes before Stewart had signed off.
